The Internet has enabled information providers to provide multimedia information to users across the world. The amount of available information has increased exponentially in the small time that the Internet has been accessible to the public.
As more and more users access information providers' large multimedia files, such as music and movies, the information providers' servers became overloaded. The bottleneck became the bandwidth that the servers could handle.
Replica (including caching) servers were introduced that were spread across the Internet. The caching servers contained mirror images of the information providers' multimedia files. This eased the burden on the information providers' servers by offloading the user requests to the caching servers. Replicating the information providers' multimedia files across the caching servers required a large amount of storage for infrequently accessed files and Internet bandwidth.
Additionally, the number of files that are actually accessed within an information provider's collection of multimedia files is low in comparison to the total number of files in the collection.
Based on the foregoing, there is a clear need for a system that provides for the intelligent distribution of an information provider's multimedia files across the Internet. Additionally, there is a need for a system that allows servers across the Internet to dynamically adapt to varying demands for multimedia files.